The Surgeon by Lex Chamberlin
“I am not a necromancer,” I repeat, blood dripping off my chin with patters of splat splat splat onto the reports spilling across the interrogation table. “I’m a doctor. Just a doctor.”
“Mm,” the interrogator purrs. Red flecks from the events of the past half hour speckle the words on her badge: Necrohunter Tess Belmont, now more like Necrohonter Toss BelmoO. “Of course you are. And what an incredible doctor you’ve been.” She plucks out of the pile the cover pages of my dossier. With a saccharine smile, she begins again down my list of suspect cases requisitioned by the crackdown’s taskforce:
“Flagged patient one, thirty-six years old, motor vehicle accident involving impalement and a sucking chest wound. Patient deceased twenty-six minutes before successful revival. Surgeon: Dr. Hera Campbell.
“Flagged patient two, eighty-seven years old, internal decapitation after a fall down three flights of stairs. Emergency spinal repair successful, patient revived after forty minutes deceased. Surgeon: Dr. Hera Campbell.
“Flagged patient three—”
I can’t sit through this again. “Maybe I’m just good at my job—”
Tess’s grin widens as she sends a sharp backhand across my cheek.
My cell is lightless and deliberately chilled, all hidden angles and frigid concrete. I’m not meant to want to be back here. Humans can’t survive these temperatures for long, and by all accounts, necromantic activation requires both energy and warmth to pull off. I’m meant to crave the interrogation room, to want to give in. To give them anything. But even shivering in a ball, throat raw, scrubs crunchy with dried blood…I don’t.
I count backward from ten, then uncurl my limbs. Take a deep breath. I crawl across five feet of crumbling floor, then worm my back up against the cold wall. I close my eyes to the dark, and my shaking hands settle on my knees, face up—just imitation, all I know of meditation. Still, I try. I clear my mind to nothing. When that fails to reveal a hidden sense, I try images of my patients. I don’t know which to concentrate on.
I do know that Tess is right.
I didn’t believe her, at first. Unconscious necromancy isn’t public knowledge, and the idea is a slap in the face to my practice. But the further we got into the evidence…I’ve been lying through my teeth the past three sessions. I only continue because the more time she wastes convincing me, the longer I can protect my patients.
What I need more than anything else now is to remember. The news stories, the online rumors. My proudest cases. The science behind it all—the magic?
The icy rattling in my chest feels like a timebomb.
I’m warm again, back at Tess’s mercy.
“You know, we can just as easily kill off all your patients,” she sneers. “We do have that list.” She digs her nails into my wrists, presses her weight down as she hovers over me.
I sputter at the insanity of the threat, a swell of fury rising in my chest. When she hits me again, my ears ring. Blood falls into my mouth from my swollen nose—
Then there’s something new.
A hot, delicate string. Invisible, pulsing. Pulling at my fingertip, a yearning, from somewhere far outside the walls—
No, two strings.
Three—
In the cold and dark again, I nurture Tess’s gift to me. A blaze of protective fury heats my hands. I hold them together as though praying to amplify it.
By all accounts, reanimations can go their whole lives without knowing, without even family ever suspecting. Whole armies lying in wait, indistinguishable from never-dead humans. They are normal people. Innocent.
Until the call.
Then, their irises glow, a sickening iridescent green. Their strength magnifies. While the necromancer lives, the human disappears: bullets become pebbles, loved ones mere obstacles. By then, nothing short of annihilation can keep a thrall from its demonic master.
At least, that’s how last week’s newspaper put it.
The strings at my fingertips heat to a pitch I can almost see, then seize. I send something out. I was never trained—I don’t know what I’m doing. But I need them close. I need them safe.
I need us all safe.
My jaw is slack, eyes unfocused as Tess prowls around me.
“Just tell me which patients we missed,” she hisses.
Distantly, I wonder why untethered reanimations are even a concern. They’re going to kill me anyway. Is it fear another necromancer could find a way to adopt them? Experimentation? But I’m too preoccupied with my body to ask. My fingers prickle and burn from the swelling tension on the strings. I barely feel my face as she slaps me again. Her breath is heavy just inches away, murder in her clenched jaw.
“You want them all dead?” she asks. “There are children in your records, you evil—”
The facility’s alarm cuts her off.
The room shudders as lockdown initiates, and she gasps and pulls away from me. I know the assessment taking place: She’s watching my hands, for the telltale manipulations. My eyes, for the unhinged intensity shown in the final stages of the call. My throat, for that wrathful song we all seem to know. My lips, for a sneer of victory.
The problem is, I watch the news.
I’ve seen the CCTV footage, and I’ve read the warnings. I know the ceremony that trained necromancers inject into the ritual. How newly conscious practitioners often imitate them. But I’ve also heard the rumors that none of that, strictly speaking, is necessary—and now, I know that too.
I give her nothing. My drooping eyelids close. My chin hits my chest, something warm trickling onto my shirt. My connections gleam so bright I can’t believe she doesn’t see them, but she must not, because she leaves me alive—she unholsters her weapon and runs out to fight alongside her fellow hunters. I smile as the door slams shut.
I laugh as the screaming begins.
